1974: A Personal History

Bestselling novelist Prose (The Vixen) documents a single, pivotal year of her life in her visceral debut memoir. In 1972, Prose fled Cambridge, Mass., her failing marriage, and an in-progress graduate degree for San Francisco, where she lived off and on for the next few years. “I liked feeling free,” she writes, “alive and on edge, even a little bit afraid.” In 1974, as 26-year-old Prose prepared to publish her second novel, The Glorious Ones, she met Tony Russo in San Francisco through mutual friends; three years before, Russo had been indicted alongside Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers. Dazzled by Russo’s heroic reputation, Prose spent rainy winter evenings riding shotgun in his Buick, absorbing his monologues about Vietnam, the RAND corporation, and his shadowy enemies in government. She fantasized about taking their relationship, which had become sexual, into more explicitly romantic territory, though friends and tarot readers warned Prose that the affair would “end badly.” After she returned to New York City to promote her book in the summer, that prophecy came true: she reunited with Tony in a disastrous episode that made her complicit in his public disgrace. Prose braids musings on the Patty Hearst kidnapping, Nixon’s resignation, and other historical events into her finely wrought narrative, expertly using them to throw her own coming-of-age into relief against the dawning political cynicism of 1970s America. Deeply felt and devastatingly confessional, this brave personal reckoning isn’t easy to forget. (June)